SYMHC Classics: Jethro Tull

This 2021 episode covers Jethro Tull. Today, most people only know that as the name of a band, but Tull was an 18th-century gentleman farmer often credited with inventing the seed drill. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 2:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  Happy Saturday. After this week's episode on the swing riots, we are staying in the world of British agriculture today for today's Saturday classic. It is our episode on Jethro Tull, most well-known for creating a seed drill. This episode talks more about the long-term impact of mechanization and the British agricultural revolution, rather than the immediate impacts on farm workers in the short term, which is what we talked about more in the swing riots episode. The big exception is Tull's own workers, who he very obviously wanted to replace with machines.

• 3:06Holly Frey?

  This episode, which is very fun in many ways, originally came out on December 22, 2021. Enjoy.

• 3:15Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 3:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 3:28Holly Frey?

  And I'm Holly Frey.

• 3:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  My comfort TV viewing lately has been those BBC historic farm shows that came out in the 2000s and the 20 teens. I haven't actually seen the first one, which is called Tales from the Green Valley. I'm not sure if that's streaming anywhere, but I have made my way through Victorian Farm, Edwardian Farm, Wartime Farm, and Tudor Monastery Farm. If you've never seen these, they are filmed over a year at a living history site. There's a historian named Ruth Goodman, and then archaeologist, they started out with Peter Ginn and Alex Langlands, and then Tom Penfold replaced Alex in Tudor Monastery Farm. So in each of these series, they try to recreate what life was like for British farmers at

• 4:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  a particular place in time. And they have been like my downtime viewing for the past little stretch. So watching these in the order that they came out means that I had seen a lot of fields being planted using a seed drill, which is a machine that digs a place for the seeds to grow, and it drops the seeds into that place, and then it covers them up. And then I got to Tudor Monastery Farm, which is set before the seed drill was used in Britain. And there's this whole scene where Peter and Tom are getting ready to sow their seeds by manual broadcasting, which just means flinging them out by hand

• 4:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  into the field. And the narrator says something about how this is how it was done before Jethro Tull invented the seed drill. And I had one of those record-scratch mental moments because I think of Jethro Tull as the name of a band. And while I probably, you know, assumed that this band was named for a person, I definitely did not recall that the person was an 18th century gentleman farmer, often credited with inventing the seed drill. So that became what I had to do a podcast on next.

• 5:31Holly Frey?

  He could or could not play the jazz flute. We don't know.

• 5:36Holly Frey?

  We actually don't know Jethro Tull's birth date, but he was baptized on March 30, 1674, in Basleton, Berkshire, England. His parents were Dorothy and Jethro Tull, and they were an established farming family, but not a wealthy one. In fact, the greater Tull family had a range of legal and financial problems. Some of them connected to their work as land agents for other people.

• 6:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  The elder Jethro Tull also had an uncle who was also named Jethro Tull. This other Jethro Tull was married to a woman named Mary. And at various points, Jethro, husband of Dorothy, and Jethro, husband of Mary, transferred lands to one another as they tried to keep it from being seized in legal action or as payment for a debt. It is all a confusing enough tangle that some early biographies thought that these two older Jethro Tulls were the same person. And a paper that I read that tried to sort all of this out used Roman numerals to differentiate them, even though they were not really Jethro Tull the first, second, and third.

• 6:46Holly Frey?

  The agriculturist Jethro Tull, that is the Jethro Tull who this episode is about, did not disclose very much about his personal life after becoming very well-known for his farming methods. Some of this is probably connected to his family history. All those debts and lawsuits would have been embarrassing, and they also kind of left him on financially shaky ground. He also got a lot of criticism, which we will get to, which seems to have made him just reluctant to talk about himself. So what we know about his life is mostly pieced together from his writing.

• 7:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  Jethro Tull attended St. John's College, Oxford, but there's no evidence that he earned a degree. Then in 1693, he was admitted as a student at Gray's Inn, which is one of the four Inns of Court in London. He was going to study law. This was in preparation for a career in politics, but his family's legal and debt drama combined with his own chronic illness to derail that plan. As is often the case with historical figures, we don't know the details of his illness, but it's often described as a respiratory disorder, possibly tuberculosis.

• 7:56Holly Frey?

  Tull was called to the bar in 1699, but rather than practicing law, he started working on one of the Tulls' farms in Oxfordshire. He also got married that year to a woman named Susanna Smith on October 26. The pair would go on to have five children, four daughters, and one son.

• 8:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  Although Jethro Tull is most associated with the seed drill, his methods went beyond just using a machine to plant seeds instead of broadcasting them by hand. Francis Forbes was a follower of Tull's reforms, and here is how he described the, quote, "old husbandry" pre-Tull. This is from "The extensive practice of the new husbandry exemplified on different sorts of land for a course of years in which the various methods of plowing, hoeing, and every other process in agriculture recommended by Mr. Tull, et cetera, are considered." Forbes published that in 1786. He wrote, quote, "In the old husbandry, the tillage, namely the plowing and harrowing, is done first,

• 9:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  the plowing to open the land and the harrowing to make it fine and get out the weeds. Dung or other manure is then spread upon the land, which is plowed in, and then the seed, as of wheat or other corn, is sown by hand, broadcast, which is covered by the plow or harrow. Nothing more is usually done till harvest, except weeding, when the weeds are grown up pretty large."

• 9:28Holly Frey?

  A lot of these basic steps had been documented in Virgil's Georgics, which were written in the first century BCE. And that is a very long, multi-volume work of verse that praised the agricultural life of rural Italy, and also offered instruction on subjects like planting and tending fields and orchards, keeping bees and raising livestock. It was definitely a didactic work, but there was debate over the centuries about whether Virgil had really intended it as a step-by-step set of instructions for agriculture.

• 10:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  Regardless, by the time Tull started farming, a lot of Virgil's poetic recommendations were being taken for granted as the right way to farm. They had been incorporated into other farming and agricultural manuals. In addition to the application of manure that Forbes mentioned, there was also the burning of the stubble that was left on the field at the end of the harvest, and allowing the land to periodically lie fallow.

• 10:27Holly Frey?

  It was, in Tull's words, quote, "accident, not choice, that made me a farmer, or rather, many accidents, which could not then possibly be foreseen." Those many accidents meant that he had a farm that, quote, "I could not well dispose of, and it being about the time when plow servants first began to exalt their dominion over their masters, so that a gentleman farmer was allowed to make but little profit of his arable lands. And almost all mine, being of that sort, I resolved to plant my whole farm with Saint Foin."

• 11:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  If you think that he sounds a little resentful of his workers in this passage, you're correct. He seems to have resented needing to hire people to do anything. So Saint Foin is a legume that was grown for forage. And at this point, Saint Foin's seed was almost exclusively imported to England, and this made it expensive and kind of hard to get. And in Tull's experience, once a farmer did get it, a lot of it just did not sprout. So Tull started trying to figure out how to get the biggest result out of the smallest amount of seed, including examining how deeply the seeds should be planted and how much room they needed to grow.

• 11:44Holly Frey?

  He later wrote, quote, "I observed in several fields of Saint Foin, sown with that proportion of seed, that in those parts of them which produced the best crop, there was, as I counted them when the crop was taken off, but about one plant for each square foot of surface. And yet, the number of seeds in seven bushels sown on each acre, being calculated, amounted to 140 to each square foot. And what was yet more observable in other parts of the same fields, where a much less number of seeds had miscarried, the crop was less. Then, after I had learned perfectly how to distinguish good seeds from bad, and had, by many trials, found that scarce any, even of the best, would succeed unless

• 12:28Holly Frey?

  covered at a certain depth, especially in my strong land."

• 12:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  In other words, rather than throwing large numbers of seeds to land randomly, Tull wanted to take a more controlled approach with fewer seeds, sorted to include only the best ones. I mean, it seems like, based on how much seed people were using, and where the plants were growing the best, they were using like 140 times more seeds than was necessary. So, to try to make this whole process more controlled, quote, "I employed people to make channels, and sow a very small proportion therein, and cover it exactly. This way succeeded to my desire, and was in seed and labor but a fourth part of the expense of the common way. And yet,

• 13:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  the ground of seed was better planted. Ten acres being so well done, I did not doubt, but a thousand might have been as well done in the same manner."

• 13:29Holly Frey?

  This sounds like a success. But the next season, when Tull instructed his workers to, once again, make channels and carefully sow the seeds in them, quote, "I discovered that these people had conspired to disappoint me for the future, and never to plant a row tolerably well again. Perhaps jealous that if a great quantity of land should be taken from the plow, it might prove a diminution of their power. I was forced to dismiss my laborers, resolving to quit my scheme, unless I could contrive an engine to plant Saint Foin more faithfully than such hands would do."

• 14:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  In other words, Jethro Tull concluded that his workers were doing a bad job just to spite him. So he fired them and decided he would make a machine to sow his Saint Foin seed instead. We will talk more about that after a sponsor break.

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• 16:13Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 18:23Tracy V. Wilson?

  Jeff Riedt-Hall was not the first person to try to use some kind of a tool or a machine to plant his crops. I should also note, like, we're talking about ways to sow large fields of one crop, not like a little garden, like a little kitchen garden where you would have a couple of rows of different things, like things that require lots of seeds. Basic tools, like planting sticks, used to prepare the soil and plant the seeds and dig out root crops, those have existed around the world for millennia. There's evidence of early seed drills in China as far back as the second century, but it is not clear when or whether those might have been introduced into Europe.

• 19:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  The first setting boards, which used spaced holes to distribute the seeds more evenly, those date back to at least 1601. John Worridge included a design for a seed drill in his Systema Agriculture in 1699, but it doesn't appear that he ever actually managed to build a working model. The same is true for several seed drill designs that were patented in various parts of Europe in the late 17th century.

• 19:32Holly Frey?

  When Tall decided to contrive an engine to plant his Saint Foin, he thought about other devices that he was already familiar with, writing, "When I was young, my diversion was music. I had also the curiosity to acquaint myself thoroughly with the fabric of every part of my organ, but as little thinking than ever I should take from thence the first rudiments of a drill."

• 19:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  After dismissing his workers for not sowing the seeds to his satisfaction, Tall, "examined and compared all the mechanical ideas that had ever entered my imagination, and at last pitched upon a groove, tongue, and spring in the soundboard of the organ. With these, a little altered, and some parts of two other instruments, as far into the field as the organ is, added to them, I composed my machine. It was named a drill because when farmers used to sow their beans and peas into channels or furrows by hand, they called that action drilling."

• 20:31Holly Frey?

  Tall first used this machine in 1701, and as he wrote decades later, "It planted that farm much better than hands could have done, and many hundred acres besides. And 30 years' experience shows that Saint Foin thus planted brings better crops and lasteth longer than sown Saint Foin."

• 20:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  So this device had a grooved, rotating cylinder that would carry the seeds from a hopper above to a funnel underneath. The cylinder was also the axle for the drill's wheels, so it turned as the wheels did. There was a plow toward the front of the drill that created a channel for the seeds to drop into, and then there was a harrow in the back of the drill, and that covered the seeds up. So this meant that the seeds were dropped in a straight line to a specific depth and then covered all at once, as long as your horse was going in a straight line while pulling it. So in Tall's words, his drill did this, "with great exactness and expedition."

• 21:34Holly Frey?

  Tall made various refinements to the device itself and how it was used, ultimately ending up with a process in which two or three rows of plants were planted between eight and 10 inches apart. Those two or three rows were on ridges that were four to six feet apart, leaving enough room for a horse to walk down on the field without trampling anything.

• 21:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  In Tall's mind, this was just a huge improvement over manually broadcasting seeds. Even if somebody was pretty good at scattering seeds by hand, there was typically too much seed in some places and too little in others. If the field was furrowed ahead of time to accommodate the seeds, some of the seeds landed in the furrows, but other ones didn't. Seed that was too deep in the soil might not grow as well, and if it was too shallow, it was more likely to be eaten by birds. Planting in rows also made it easier to get into the field, to check on the crop, and to remove weeds and to harvest. And as Tall noted, a field that was fully planted with this method required far fewer

• 22:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  seeds than manual broadcasting did. But other farmers who saw what he was doing, a lot of them thought he was letting a lot of plantable land go to waste by leaving these four to six-foot gaps in between his rows.

• 22:54Holly Frey?

  Tall farmed in Oxfordshire for about 10 years before moving to Prosperous Farm in Shelbourne, Berkshire, which was another farm that had been in the Tall family. And sometime in the early 17-teens, he traveled to Italy and France for the sake of his health. He returned to England after somewhere between two and four years, but these dates are again unclear, with the only clue to try to pin it down being the baptism of his daughter Sarah in October of 1713.

• 23:23Tracy V. Wilson?

  Something that Tall noticed while in Italy and France was how carefully the vineyards were planted and managed. The soil in between the rows was carefully tilled to the point of being pulverized, and workers meticulously hoed the earth around the plants as well. Tall came to the conclusion that this pulverized soil was providing more nutrients to the plants. Basically, he thought that the soil itself, tiny, tiny particles of soil, were what the plants were eating through what he called "lactile mouths" on their roots. He decided that soil, and only soil, was what plants needed to survive, not something

• 24:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  in the soil, not water, not air, not sunlight, just very, very finely tilled soil. In his mind, the role of water in this equation was to carry the tiny soil particles closer to those lactile mouths.

• 24:24Holly Frey?

  The cartoon that has formed in my head is so delightful right now. Tall decided to try pulverizing the soil around his crops at Prosperous Farm, where much of the land was relatively shallow and chalky. He developed a horse-drawn plow for this purpose, using it in that gap between his rows, while workers manually hoed the soil around the plants themselves. He thought new roots had more mouths than old roots, so if a plant's roots were broken by all this hoeing, that was okay. It just meant new roots would grow in to replace them, complete with more mouths.

• 25:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  Tall tried this method on several different crops at his farm, including turnips, potatoes, and wheat, and he reported that it was enormously successful in terms of efficiency and yield. And as a bonus, it allowed him to replace some of his higher-paid workers with women and children, who he could pay a lot less, since their jobs mostly involved moving clods of dirt out of the way if they fell in a bad spot after plowing. And in his opinion, this method eliminated the need for manure, something he was extremely pleased about, since he thought manure spread weeds.

• 25:37Holly Frey?

  He claimed that this method allowed him to grow wheat in the same field for 13 years without using manure or allowing the soil to lie fallow. He said, "The finer land is made by tillage, the richer will it become and the more plants will it maintain." Or more briefly, tillage is manure.

• 25:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  So to be fair, the details about how plants grew and what it took to nourish them were poorly understood in Britain at this point. All around the world, for the whole history of agriculture, people had been using techniques like crop rotation, planting different types of plants together, and using things like manure, urine, fish parts, and other materials to restore the soil. But while people knew that these steps usually led to a better harvest, they didn't know why they worked exactly. Today, we understand that specific nutrients are critical to plant growth, especially phosphorus, potassium, and nitrogen.

• 26:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  But when Tall was farming, only phosphorus had even been discovered. Europeans also only had a partial understanding of photosynthesis. And as we noted earlier, a lot of the conventional farming wisdom was drawn from Virgil, that was more than 1,700 years old. That doesn't mean it was necessarily bad, it's just been around for a really long time.

• 27:03Holly Frey?

  Did not have the benefit of newly developed ideas and discoveries.

• 27:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right.

• 27:08Holly Frey?

  But even with all of that in mind, Tall's ideas about plants being better able to consume very fine particles of pulverized soil were just not correct. His intensive hoeing definitely helped remove weeds that would have competed with his crops for nutrients, and it probably allowed water to penetrate more easily, especially if rainfall and dew meant that that soil never totally dried out. But he was not making it easier for plants to take in soil particles through these tiny theoretical root mouths, and hoeing definitely did not take the place of replenishing the soil's nutrients with something like manure.

• 27:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, I think a big reason that he was able to make that 13 years of wheat in the same field, number one, we're taking his word on that.

• 27:53Holly Frey?

  Right.

• 27:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  It was still as great in year 13 as it had been in year one. But the fact that he had these big spaces in his rows probably meant that the soil was not being exhausted, as it would have been if it had been packed more tightly together with plants. In 1731, Tall published some of his ideas in a work called "The New Horse Hoeing Husbandry", or "An Essay on the Principles of Tillage and Vegetation, Wherein Is Shown a Method of Introducing a Sort of Vineyard Culture Into the Cornfields." He called this a specimen, it was something that he planned to expand on in a longer work.

• 28:30Holly Frey?

  Tall nearly abandoned this plan after a plagiarized version of his essay showed up not long after. He claimed his was the first book on agriculture ever to be so pirated. But regardless, his friends encouraged him to continue on, and in 1733, he published the much longer "The Horse Hoeing Husbandry", or "An Essay on the Principles of Tillage and Vegetation, Designed to Introduce a New Method of Culture, Whereby the Produce of Land Will Be Increased and the Usual Expense Lessened, Together with Accurate Descriptions and Cuts of the Instruments Employed in It."

• 29:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  Uh, not everybody was happy about this. We will talk about it after a sponsor break.

• 29:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  This episode is brought to you by YouTube Premium. Samantha, you know I watch a lot of YouTube. I watch a lot of it for fun, but I also watch a lot of it for research for this show. And I also put on a lot of stuff in the background, videos in the background to set a mood. I find it very relaxing, or sometimes kind of hype, you know, if you're looking to get ready to go out. Yeah, I use it too. And YouTube Premium takes something you already love, YouTube, and makes it even better. The content, the creators, the feeling of

• 29:45Holly Frey?

  Finding exactly what you're into for every mood and moment of your day. Premium transforms that experience into a more supercharged, enhanced way to enjoy YouTube. Yes, a YouTube Premium subscription gives you access to exclusive YouTube features and benefits, including but not limited to being ad-free. So uninterrupted videos, background play, so that lets you keep listening with your screen locked, and offline downloads, so you can download your videos to watch anywhere. So if you like YouTube, you'll love Premium. Sign up now for your free trial. Terms and conditions apply. We've all done it. Tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed.

• 30:30Holly Frey?

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• 31:14Holly Frey?

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• 31:24Holly Frey?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesse have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy

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• 33:24Holly Frey?

  Jethro Tull's book, The Horse-Hoeing Husbandry, explained his process for planting and hoeing the fields and his reasoning behind it. It included diagrams of the equipment that a farmer would need for such an enterprise, with explanations of what the parts of those machines did and how they worked. There were different seed drills for different types of crops, plus horse-drawn hoes and other tools, all of his design. This on its own would have caused at least some controversy. The upfront cost for equipment would have been significant, especially since manufacturing methods had not progressed to the point that things like this could really be mass-produced. You would need experienced craftsmen who could build the machines mostly from scratch.

• 34:09Holly Frey?

  Plus, a lot of farmers still found that six-foot gap between rows to just be incredibly wasteful. Beyond all that, though, Tull also took the time in his book to criticize existing farming practices, which he framed as "old husbandry" or even "bad husbandry." His own method was the "new husbandry" or "the good husbandry," and at times, he took aim directly at Virgil, criticizing Virgil's recommendations for how to do things like plow, burn, and till the land. Gardener and nurseryman Stephen Switzer was particularly outraged by all of this. It's possible that at least some of his outrage stemmed from the fact that part of his income came from selling seeds.

• 34:52Holly Frey?

  So if everyone started using methods that required just a fraction of their normal seed purchases, that would damage his business. But he also seems to have been incensed on principle, seeing Virgil's work as the foundation of good husbandry that had, quote, "stood the test of so many ages," and probably seeing Virgil himself as a man who should not have to face this kind of insolence. So Switzer established a private society of husbandmen and planters in opposition to Tull, although it's not clear how many members there were besides Switzer, if any. He accused Tull of plagiarizing John Worlidge, as well as earlier agricultural writers.

• 35:36Holly Frey?

  Switzer also pointed out specific flaws that he saw in Tull's ideas. For example, it was, quote, "ridiculous to affirm that one in the same culture and one in the same kind of manure is common to all sorts of land." Switzer even accused Tull of being an atheist. Oh, the very worst. Switzer published Practical Husbandmen and Planter, or Observations on the Ancient and Modern Husbandry, Planting and Gardening, over a series of installments. These volumes lay out Switzer's ideas of good husbandry, many of which were drawn from Virgil, and they directly criticized Tull's work, as well as criticizing Tull as a person.

• 36:18Holly Frey?

  Here is a sample, quote, "If men are known by their words as a tree is by its fruit, there never was a man who has distinguished himself more than the author of the horse-hoeing husbandry has. The deepest rivers are generally allowed to be the most silent, and the greatest noise is ever found where there is the least depth of water. And it is the general, but true, observation that those who are weakest in understanding are the strongest in opinion. This author has, by uttering his precipitate and crude conceptions, discovered himself to be little better than the animal in the fable, who, putting on the lion's skin, terrified all the beasts of the forest, till by his voice they knew who he was."

• 37:03Holly Frey?

  Had some very clear opinions about Jethro Tull. So Jethro Tull responded to Switzer's many criticisms with a supplement to the essay on horse-hoeing husbandry in 1736. This, he tried to refute Switzer point by point. He called the Society of Husbandmen and Planters "the equivocal society," or just equivocus. This appeared in later editions of Horse-Hoeing Husbandry as Jethro Tull's supplement answering the objections of equivocus in defense of Virgil. Among his points, quote, "Equivocus falsely accuses Tull of disrespect and not finding one useful truth in the Georgic.

• 37:46Holly Frey?

  By quoting falsely, equivocus does not prove his case." I feel like these two men would have loved Twitter, but that's a... That was... I'm imagining like one of the, like a Tumblr fight where people keep... That's going on forever. Switzer was not, though, the only person Tull was not getting along with. Jethro's son, John, was extravagant in his spending, and his relationship to his family seems to have become strained. After Tull died on February 21, 1741, at the age of 66, he left his property to his sister-in-law and his daughters, but he left John only a shilling. John ultimately died in a debtor's prison in 1764.

• 38:32Holly Frey?

  Jethro Tull was widely read and hotly debated from the 1730s until the end of his life in 1741. But after his death, most of his techniques sort of fell out of favor for a time, at least in Britain. His work was translated into French, although the French translations mostly focused on the techniques that were most demonstrably workable and not on things that seemed a little more far-fetched.

• 38:58Holly Frey?

  The roots have mouths. Tull's legacy as a farmer is kind of a mixed bag. In the words of T. H. Marshall, writing in the Economic History Review in 1929, quote, "He had apparently first evolved his system of husbandry, then invented a scientific theory to explain it, and finally begun to study the literature of his subject."

• 39:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  Overall, Marshall's analysis of Tull's agricultural reforms is not favorable. He wrote, quote, "Pastity is apt to be overkind to the inventor. It remembers only those of his ideas which have been incorporated in the life of the present and forgets all those which time has rejected. It assumes that his mistakes and false notions were due to the ignorance of his age rather than to his own incompetence, and convicts of pusillanimity those of his contemporaries who hesitated to follow his inspirations, shedding his errors as they traveled onwards." And so it is with Tull. But the picture is false.

• 40:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  His mistakes were not those of his age. The experts of his day could and did denounce them as mistakes. The bad elements in his system were not merely traditions from the past, which he was not yet ready to throw aside. They were new. He was asking men to make a revolution in order to adopt what was unsound. It is not surprising that they hesitated.

• 40:30Holly Frey?

  A lot of Tull's ideas were just wildly incorrect, but there were elements to his work that were useful and withstood the test of time, like developing ways to plant fields more uniformly and efficiently and wasting less seed. In 1762, the London-based Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacturers, and Commerce established a medal for people who improved on the seed drill and who tested methods of old and new husbandry to determine what worked best and what didn't.

• 41:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  Tull was also part of what came to be known as the agricultural revolution in Britain as people developed improved ways to prepare the soil, plant, tend, and harvest. This ran alongside the enclosure movement in which previously common land was enclosed in fences and small farms were consolidated into large estates that were controlled by one wealthy landlord, often one who wanted very large fields of a single crop to be sold for the best possible price.

• 41:33Holly Frey?

  Apart from changes in land use and animal husbandry, the agricultural revolution was also connected to the development of machines like improved plows, cultivators, threshers, and Tull's seed drill. Through all these developments between 1700 and 1870, British farms became about four times more productive. This led to a drop in food prices and an increase in the varieties of food available. Improvements in food preservation played a part in all of this as well. All this contributed to an increasing in population. Just in the 18th century, the population of England and Wales almost doubled.

• 42:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  We should note that this increase in food production did not eliminate poverty or famine. The Great Famine in Ireland, which we've covered in a two-part episode of the podcast, took place during this same time. But the issue in this famine was not a lack of food. There was plenty of food being grown for export, but a blight killed the potato crop that Irish farmers were living off of while growing other food to be sold. And the government's laissez-faire approach to the crisis led to the food continuing to be exported even as the people who were growing it were starving.

• 42:51Holly Frey?

  Even as the agricultural revolution led to more and more food being grown in Britain's rural areas, more of its population moved into the cities because the time and labor-saving devices and methods that were being developed meant that farmers could do more with fewer workers. As the agricultural revolution intersected with the industrial revolution, former rural farm workers, many of whom had lost access to land they had been using after it was enclosed, started to find jobs in urban factories instead.

• 43:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  One of the biggest points of overlap between the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution was the cotton gin, patented by Eli Whitney in 1794 and totally shifting the cotton industry. The cotton gin made harvested cotton much easier to clean, which made it more profitable to grow, which led growers to want to plant more of it, which created a demand for more and more enslaved workers in places like the American South where cotton became a primary crop. Tull's planting methods, for efficiency purposes, also fed into this process with cotton.

• 43:58Holly Frey?

  As for Jethro Tull's most famous invention, the seed drill did not become a reliable or practical part of farming until the 19th century, when improved manufacturing processes led to a model that was practical, affordable, and generally reliable. We'll write James Smith of Suffolk developed a model along with his sons, which became known as the Suffolk Drill and was available for five pounds in 1851. It could sow multiple rows at once with adjustable spacing between the rows, and it had a manure box to apply manure at the same time. The depth and rate of sowing were adjustable as well. These did not follow Tull's template of two to three rows in ridges four to six feet apart.

• 44:42Holly Frey?

  Many drilled 10 to 12 rows of seeds at once.

• 44:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, they're pretty cool to watch, which I was very much enjoying watching on all of these BBC historic farm shows. I also enjoyed watching them throw their, I think they were, they were planting, I think, field peas when they were sowing the seeds by manually broadcasting them, then leading me to just go down this whole Jethro Tull rabbit hole.

• 45:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected]. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 45:36Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 46:06Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 46:42Speaker 02

  Snoring, gasping for air during sleep, daytime sleepiness? I'm Shaquille O'Neal, and this shouldn't be anybody's experience. Ask your doctor about Zepbound trisepotide, the first and only FDA-approved prescription medicine for moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea in adults with obesity. Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, OSA, and obesity to improve their OSA. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15-milligram injection. Zepbound contains trisepotide and should not be used with other trisepotide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepbound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens

• 47:27Speaker 02

  or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic to it, or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop Zepbound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic reaction. Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia, if you're nursing, pregnant, plant-to-be, or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepbound with a sulfonylurea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems. Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-5979, or visit zepbound.lilly.com.

• 48:12Speaker 05

  Hola a todos. Soy Jamie Lynn Sigler. Cuando me diagnosticaron tenía veintitantos años y todo mi mundo cambió por completo. Pero con el tiempo decidí que no iba a permitir que eso frenara mi vida. Quise tomar las riendas. Y después de hablar con mi médico sobre mis opciones, la elección para mí fue obvia. Boom! Eso es Kisimta. Obtenga más información sobre Kisimta o fotumamab en kisimta.com.

• 48:42Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.